ALBION, MI – The findings of a research study published by an Albion College professor may help employers tell if job candidates are predisposed to unethical behavior at work.

Vicki Baker, economics and management professor, worked with colleagues from the London Business School, Cornell University, the University of Michigan and Penn State University on the project, which revealed a theory they named moral disengagement.

She thinks this kind of research may have been beneficial for such companies as Enron and Arthur Anderson, which fell under heavy media scrutiny recently for unethical and illegal acts.

“All you have to do is watch the nightly news and realize the individuals doing the ‘perp walks’ knew what they were doing was wrong, but their self-interest at the end of the day trumped moral and ethical behavior,” she said.

Baker and her group originally studied moral disengagement in children and adolescents, but they figured it could work to predict unethical behavior in adults, too.

“What it does is look at the ways people justify inappropriate behavior, and why they do or why they don’t take responsibility for it,” Baker said.

The theory uses eight criteria to measure a person’s tendency to use different justifications to make bad behavior acceptable, Baker said.

They include lying to protect friends or playing dirty to achieve noble ends, making an illegal act seem less harmful when compared to another, placing blame on an authority figure, telling small lies if no one is hurt and not being responsible for their actions because others are committing the same unethical act.

“You can put people in situations that could trigger these responses and the people who are predisposed to have them will have them,” Baker said.

Baker believes testing this on job candidates could help employers make good hires, and that training workers to identify situations that could lead to unethical acts could help them from acting on them.

“I don’t see how this is any different than doing a background check,” Baker said.